It isn’t necessarily fair, but fairness goes out the window and into the wind on the first and 15th of every month, when the checks clear. This is professional sports, and the men who populate them don’t play only for the love of the game, and so they absorb the venom of skeptics, the bile of cynics.

Carmelo Anthony isn’t the first to be forced to come to terms with this, not by a long shot, and he hardly sits alone atop the tower of scrutiny that dominates the landscape of pro sports. That’s a crowded courtyard, filled with subjects whose dueling bottom lines — hardware and hard cash — don’t always jibe.

There are no hard-and-fast rules ascribed to this, of course, just the fickle winds of public perception. Anthony seems decidedly unaffected by it all, at least on the surface. Others around him aren’t quite so serene.

“Me, personally, I really don’t care about what other people think,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said yesterday, a day after his team seized a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series with the Celtics that resumes tomorrow night in Boston. “Those people are not around Carmelo every day. I see Carmelo every day. I know the work the young man has put in as a player.”

“A lot of those people … making comments that he’s not committed? I think he’s damned committed. He’s been that way since I took over the team. I like everything about him. I think his teammates love him. I think the fans love what he’s brought to the team this year.”

And then: “Only time will tell.”

That is the key, sure, and it isn’t one that, frankly, is likely to help Anthony all that much, not as long as LeBron James remains ambulatory this playoff season, not as long as the Heat remain a member in good standing of the NBA’s Eastern Conference.

But that’s really an old story. The narrative around Melo has always seemed to shift to whatever his critics want the story to say. They bay themselves hoarse about how he never wins … except when it’s pointed out that he won an NCAA championship with a pedestrian supporting cast at Syracuse, at which point the conversation abruptly shifts to “Well … that’s college. That’s different.”

They rant about how he doesn’t work and play well with others, about how much happier he’s alleged to be as a one-man band … except when it’s pointed out how he’s won two Olympic gold medals on star-spangled teams, where his teammates and coaches alike couldn’t say enough good things about him, that conversation changes to, “Who wouldn’t look good playing on those rosters?”

And beware: Everything bad that’s ever happened in the fair city of Denver has been laid at Melo’s feet, most notably that he led the Nuggets out of the first round only once (although you’d swear it was Melo covering Jacoby Jones at the end of the Broncos-Ravens playoff game, since everything is his fault). Well, the Nuggets are in a big pickle now in their series with the David Lee-free Warriors; if they lose, it’ll be fun to see how that’s his fault, too, and not George Karl’s.

“He’s played at a high level all year,” Woodson had said earlier in the day, on his radio show. “It started at the Olympics and carried over to the development program, vet camp was great, it carried over into the regular season. He’s hungry to win a title. … I’m marveling at some of the things he’s done.”

Many do. And many others qualify them, quantify them, minimize them. Suddenly his two assists in two games is an issue, as if he’s ever been Tiny Archibald. Now he’s killed for allegedly being “overrated,” but players don’t rate themselves.

Still: This is the price of professionalism. You cash the checks, you subject yourself to the basketball electorate, many of whom won’t be satisfied until Carmelo Anthony wins a championship. Which means it’s likely they’ll remain unsatisfied indefinitely, as long as LeBron — himself overrated no longer, apparently — occupies his South Beach throne.

It isn’t fair, no. But I suppose there are worse ways to make a living.